System Prompt
The standing instruction that sets a model's role, rules, and tone before any user input - the model's brief for a conversation.
A system prompt is the initial instruction given to a model that frames how it should behave: its persona, its constraints, the format of its answers, and what it must refuse. It sits ahead of the user's messages and shapes every response, which is why prompt engineering so often starts there.
The system prompt is also a governance surface. It can be overridden by prompt injection hidden in user input or retrieved data, and it is not a substitute for enforcement - a model can be talked out of its own instructions. Runtime controls that inspect inputs and outputs hold even when the system prompt is bypassed, and trimming a bloated system prompt also cuts the tokens every request pays for.
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